Principal Data Engineer (15+ yrs)

Responsibilities

• Design enterprise data models and platform standards that scale across business domains.
• Define reference architectures, design patterns, and reusable frameworks for the enterprise data ecosystem.
• Partner with architecture, analytics, and business leaders to align data strategy with organizational priorities.
• Define and operationalize standards for data ownership, stewardship, lineage, metadata, data quality, and governance tooling.
• Ensure data handling complies with healthcare regulatory requirements, including Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and protected health information (PHI) safeguards.
• Lead database migrations, consolidation efforts, and data modernization programs, including migration roadmaps, sequencing, and cutover strategies.
• Refactor legacy pipelines and data structures into governed, reusable enterprise assets.
• Design and optimize secure, scalable, and cost-effective Snowflake solutions, including warehouse sizing, workload management, role-based access, data sharing, and cost governance.
• Design ingestion patterns for application programming interfaces (APIs), software as a service (SaaS) platforms, change data capture (CDC), batch, and event-driven sources.
• Establish standards for reliability, observability, schema management, and error handling.
• Establish continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), deployment standards, repository governance, and DataOps engineering practices.
• Mentor data engineers, set code review standards, and serve as a technical authority and trusted advisor to stakeholders and leadership.
• Communicate complex technical concepts clearly to technical and non-technical audiences, including executives, while sharing ownership, knowledge, and credit across the team.

Qualifications

• Exceptional communication skills and a proven team-player mindset.
• 10 or more years of experience in data engineering, data architecture, or related roles, including recent senior- or principal-level technical leadership.
• Deep, hands-on Snowflake expertise in production, enterprise-scale environments.
• Proven experience designing enterprise data models, such as dimensional models or Data Vault.
• Demonstrated success leading large-scale legacy database migrations and modernization programs.
• Strong experience with data governance, metadata management, lineage, and data quality frameworks.
• Experience designing ingestion architectures across batch, CDC, API, SaaS, and streaming or event-driven sources.
• Strong SQL and Python skills.
• Experience establishing CI/CD pipelines, Git-based repository governance, and DataOps practices.
• Ability to influence and advise technical and executive audiences.

Preferred Qualifications

• Healthcare or other regulated-industry experience, including HIPAA and PHI or personally identifiable information (PII) handling.
• Experience with dbt, Apache Airflow, Fivetran, Apache Kafka, Terraform, Collibra, or Alation.
• Cloud platform experience with Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), or Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
• Snowflake certification, such as SnowPro Advanced: Architect or SnowPro Advanced: Data Engineer.
• Experience supporting artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data product initiatives.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, a related field, or equivalent practical experience

Tools and Technologies

• Snowflake; SQL; Python; Git; CI/CD; DataOps; APIs; SaaS integration; CDC; batch and event-driven architecture; data governance; metadata management; data lineage; data quality frameworks.
• Preferred technologies may include dbt, Apache Airflow, Fivetran, Apache Kafka, Terraform, Collibra, Alation, Microsoft Azure, AWS, or GCP.

Pay: $85.00 - $90.00 per hour

Experience

• VCF: 5 years (Required)
• VMware: 10 years (Required)

License/Certification

* VCF 9 or above certification (Preferred)

Work Location: Remote